Beyond School

[The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous Questions ~ 2: The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job ~ 3: Adam and Eve, Backwards ~ 4. The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards ~ 5. Good, Evil, Nature, and the Hero, Backwards ~ 6. Gilgamesh and the Dawn of Man ~ 7. A Goddess Prays ~ 8. The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets]¹

Gilgamesh - the Earth's Oldest Epic. Stephen Mitchell's fine 2004 adaptation.

A good thousand years before the Israelites finished creating the God² of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims, the Mesopotamian gods of Gilgamesh were already ancient. And a good thousand years before Adam and Eve committed their first sin and brought death into the world by disobeying that God³, the “Adam” of the Sumerians – Gilgamesh’s sidekick, Enkidu – had committed his earlier “original sin.”⁴

In this lecture, I’m going to argue that Enkidu’s “sin” — which had nothing to do with disobeying any god, nor with his epic and far-from-shameful sex with Shamhat — cost our race far more than Adam and Eve’s. And we’re only now, in this generation, really able to appreciate that truth. Call it a 4,000-year-old prophecy that we’re now seeing unfold all around us.

It happens in Book V of Gilgamesh, and for the life of this modern, scientifically-minded skeptic, this “prophecy” is far more true and far more disturbing than anything we see in Eden, or perhaps in the whole Bible. If it doesn’t haunt you a bit by the end of this lecture, then one of us has problems.

The funny thing is, it happens in such a subtle form that it’s easy to miss. And it’s that subtlety that makes me want to state, for the millionth time in this series, that the poets who wrote Gilgamesh were among humanity’s finest ever.

Funnier still, it happens in the very suckiest episode in all of Gilgamesh: the slaying of the monster Humbaba.

Predictably, the well-meaning sadists who produce our suckiest literature textbook anthologies seem to always inflict this episode on our high school students. These out of touch souls seem to think teens will find monster-slaying scenes really cool. Between movies like Harry Potter that let us see and hear monsters like the Dementors almost sucking our souls out, and video games that let us chop the bastards’ heads off ourselves and be covered in their blood and gore, this Humbaba scene in Gilgamesh doesn’t stand a chance. It ranks about as high on today’s adventure scale as an exposed Victorian ankle ranks on the scale of modern sexiness.

So fear not: this English teacher isn’t going to insult your intelligence by arguing that this this chapter is good for its scary monster. There’s terror enough in this chapter – reality-based terror, at least in my reading of it – for us to need no supernatural special effects.

Background: Before the Divine Divorce

Adam and Eve’s original sin reflects a recent, radical stage in the evolution of Israelite religion: the separation of the divine from the realm of Nature. It’s the first religion we know of that saw God outside of Nature, transcending it. Unlike all the other religions in the Near East up to that time, the Jewish religion saw God not as created within Nature, but as creator of it. So it makes sense that the “original sin” in the book of Genesis is disobeying that God. He’s the King, the Lord, the Master of the Universe. He ordered Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit of a certain tree, and they disobeyed. That’s the sin.

We can play with some of the depths of this myth some other time, because there’s much more beneath the surface of this seemingly silly “I told you not to eat that fruit” story. But the point I want to make here is that this myth only makes sense within the revolutionary worldview of a certain set of Hebrews around 1,000 BCE. It doesn’t make sense inside the older Mesopotamian view of the Gilgamesh poets.

Their gods are not divorced from Nature. They live in it, they have natural bodies and functions, they even have divine animals like the Bull of Heaven (which, as we see later when it takes what we can only describe as an “epic shit” on Enkidu, has divine-but-natural bodily functions).

As importantly, there’s no “Master of the Universe” god in the Mesopotamian worldview, so there’s nobody to give absolute “commandments” like “Thou shalt not eat that fruit.” One god might be stronger than another, but that doesn’t make him or her all-powerful over all the others. Remember from Lecture 1 that these gods, additionally, don’t seem to think the Biblical god’s authoritarian commandments are the best way to deal with humans anyway: they didn’t punish Gilgamesh for deflowering all his subjects’ brides, and they didn’t command him to stop – or, as so often in the Bible, declare he be stoned to death. Instead, they pulled that totally mysterious and totally cool trick of creating Enkidu to somehow, wtf?, give Gilgamesh an experience that will wise him up and make him stop being such a royal ass. In short, they weren’t punishing “sin” – they were curing stupidity.

And yet I still claim that Enkidu, in Book V, commits an “original sin.” So what gives?

A Question of Balance

Let’s recap Enkidu’s story, because Enkidu is more interesting than Gilgamesh in this episode. It ain’t about the hero here.

As we’ve seen, Enkidu starts as a sort of “wild-man Adam,” created out of dust and outside of civilization, to be the “balance” who will “bring peace” to Gilgamesh and his city.⁵ Unlike Adam, Enkidu lives in a nature that we recognize as realistically Darwinian: animals prey on other animals in Enkidu’s Nature, and Enkidu seems one animal among many in the way he drinks at the watering hole with them and runs as fast as the gazelles. The only difference we see between Enkidu and the other animals is his role in defending animals from predators. So Enkidu seems compassionate, and in a very specific and important sense: he’s compassionate toward natural creatures. His most outstanding trait, in this stage of innocence, is that he’s a defender of Nature.

Then along comes the prostitute Shamhat, you’ll remember, and her civilizing mission: she seduces him into civilization with that epic six-day roll in the hay (and boy, how Enkidu must have needed, like that later god in Genesis, to take a day of rest on the seventh). Similar to Samson, Enkidu loses much of his physical power after this epic sex scene, can’t sprint like he used to, and so forth – but he gains language, the ability to share ideas and conversation, the need for friendship, and the desire to follow Shamhat into the city and meet Gilgamesh. Still, though, Enkidu seems not to have lost his character as the compassionate defender: he wants to fight Gilgamesh after hearing of his bride-stealing ass-hattery.

Remember the “double that balances” motif? The “balance” seems to be thrown off when natural Enkidu leaves the wild, and crosses the gateway into civilized Gilgamesh’s city. It’s like both guys are now sitting on the same side of the see-saw – the city side. Nature’s left hanging in mid-air now.

Then they fight, Enkidu loses, and he and Gilgamesh become fast friends. Enkidu likes clothes and bread and beer, and life is good – until Gilgamesh gets that royally wild hair up his royally dumb ass to go kill Humbaba, who he calls a “monster.”⁶

Enkidu, Defender of Animals, tells Gilgamesh it’s a really bad idea to kill Humbaba, and reminds him that he’s not just a monster: he’s the divinely-appointed Guardian of the Cedar Forest. Enlil put him there to keep the forest, which is sacred to the gods, untouched by man, and off-limits to him.

Gilgamesh cares no more for the virgin forest than he cares for the virginity of his brides. Whether he’s taking his metaphorical axe to the virgin brides, or his literal one to the virgin cedars, it’s all the same to this swaggering dumb jock of a king: if it redounds to his glory and gives him an heroic notch for his belt, his name won’t die and he’ll achieve everlasting fame.

After Enkidu loses the argument, he tries to get the city elders to talk sense into Gilgamesh with their religious “knowledge” and urgings to fear the gods. At their pious warning that no human could succeed at this task against the gods’ will, Gilgamesh laughs possibly the first atheist’s laugh in history – or literature, anyway – and off he and Enkidu go to slay the monster.⁷

Off they go, straight through the gate from civilization, and back into Nature. Our “balance that doubles” motif has now seen both men jump onto the Nature side of the see-saw. Now it’s civilization that’s left hanging in mid-air – and hanging, the way I see it, fatefully.

The Original Sin – Literally

By the logic of the “double that balances” motif, everything hangs on Enkidu now. He originally balanced the civilization-symbol Gilgamesh by being the Nature-symbol “defender of animals” in the wild. He threw things out of balance by “crossing over” to civilization. Now we’ve got Gilgamesh crossing over into Enkidu’s original realm with him, balancing Enkidu’s earlier “crossing-over.” We know Gilgamesh has predatory motives for this trip: he’s going to kill the Forest Guardian, and chop down the “highest cedars.” So the question is, is Enkidu going to stay true to his original role, when he was “innocent” and Adam-like, of defending nature’s creatures against predators – even if the predator is now his friend and king?⁸

(to be continued)

1. This series based on the fine 2004 Stephen Mitchell adaptation of Gilgamesh. [↩]
2. let’s put that at around 622 BCE in the Southern Kingdom of Judah, when King Josiah’s reforms wiped out the Jewish worship of Baal and Asherah [↩]
3. in Genesis 2, which was written around 1,000 BCE [↩]
4. I know that “original sin” is a Christian, not a Jewish, doctrine, but grant me the poetic license. [↩]
5. The Bible’s story of Adam and Eve was written in Jerusalem, scholars think, at about the same time David conquered that city and made it his capital around 1,000 BCE. That’s a full 3,000 years later in history than the founding of civilization in cities like Uruk. This is significant: it corrects the view that Genesis is a story from the beginning of civilization, when it’s actually precisely mid-way between the founding of Uruk and today. If Gilgamesh is pictured as the letter “A”, and our time the letter “Z,” the Jewish scriptures would be not “B” or “C,” but “M.” In strictly chronological terms, the period from the Jews’ King David in 1,000 BCE to the life of Jesus in the First Century CE are really the “Middle Ages” of the 6,000 years between Sumer and today.

   This may help explain why the Judeo-Christian story of humanity’s “state of nature” – the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2 – rings so false, while the Sumerian story of Enkidu rings more true: the authors of Genesis came too late in our history to have any ancestral memory of man’s true, historical state of nature. What we know now of human evolution tells us the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is fiction – fiction with depths that give it the status of a fascinating myth, in the best sense of the word, but fiction nonetheless. Not so for the Sumerians and, through them – via Gilgamesh – the Babylonians. Since the people of Uruk were among the first to transition from neolithic life within nature to civilized life isolated from it, it’s no wonder that the story of Enkidu living as an animal among animals in nature is much closer to the truth of human evolution as we now know it through science. Unlike Adam and Eve, then, which is clearly a myth, Enkidu is just as clearly closer to history. Yes, he was made, like Adam, from clay, but the similarity ends there. Enkidu is not in any paradisal Eden, living a life of pre-lapsarian ease; he’s more of a primate living a Darwinian existence, drinking among other animals at a watering hole, fighting off predators in the kill-or-be-killed struggle to survive in the wild. He has the ring of less of myth than of legend – of something closer to dimly-remembered truth. [↩]

6. In his Introduction to Gilgamesh, Stephen Mitchell, who wrote the version of the epic I’m primarily using for these lectures, compares Gilgamesh here to our previous Royal Dumb-Ass in Chief George W. Bush when he decided to invade Iraq, and it’s an interesting parallel. I’m going for a reading less topical and more timeless here, though. [↩]
7. Now give me a medal, because I just summarized the 10,000 or so words of all the previous lectures in a few paragraphs. [↩]
8. And while we’re at it, it’s worth getting abstract for a second to entertain the idea that, on the symbolic level, Enkidu is Humbaba, in a sense. They’re both, after all, guardians of nature. If Gilgamesh kills Humbaba, he’s in a weird sense also killing Enkidu. Maybe that’s a stretch, but reading symbols often is. Whatever. [↩]

[I thought this post would be a farewell to Seoul. Instead, it wanted to be something I should have written three years ago, when I ended my six years in Shanghai. It won. I'll say bye to Korea later. And isn't writing a wonderful thing.]

*     *     *

It’s probably normal to hit a “regrets” stage when you close out your time in a foreign land. All the things you didn’t do, didn’t appreciate, didn’t explore. I’m certainly there. I leave Seoul for Singapore in a month, the next strange chapter in this stranger’s life.

I’ve made no secret over the last three years about my luke-warm to icy feelings regarding Korea. But really, Korea never had a fair shake with me. I came here after six years in Shanghai, for crying out loud, one of the most friendly and colorful and dynamic and blessedly cheap metropolises in the world. I learned enough Mandarin while there to be able to engage the Shanghainese in surprisingly meaty conversations, with the added entertainment value for my Chinese interlocutors that I carried them out with the vocab and grammar of a four-year-old. Learning babyspeak made it fun to be a stupid foreigner there.

And then there’s the fact that for China, a swarm of foreigners is a new experience. The Chinese borders were closed to the world until very recently, so we foreigners are items of extreme exoticism and curiosity there. And Shanghai and the other big cities have also seen an influx of migrants from the under-developed central and western regions of China – peasants who have never seen a weiguoren, a “white devil.” Bonus points if you’re of African descent: I’ve known such people who’ve told me the Chinese walked up to them and, without a word, touched their skin and hair in wonder.

All of this, in a word, makes living in China as a foreigner a constant form of play.

And then there’s the flip side: China’s 50-year isolation after the Communist Revolution means that it’s blessedly non-Westernized. Away from the tourist and shopping districts in the cities’ shiny new centers, in the traditional city neighborhoods, the city outskirts, the small towns and villages, and the countryside, there are no signs of Western civilization consumerism. No Starbucks or Burger Kings or damnable WalMarts or Gaps. Instead, there are mom-and-pop markets, farmers’ markets, noodle shops, karaoke bars, fabric markets full of tailors, foot-rub and massage parlors. There are as many bicycles as cars in this purer, disappearing China – and these bicycles, often ancient, battered, rickety and wobbly, are a breed far removed from the status-conscious Treks and whatnots that would cost many Chinese a full year’s salary. Grandmas and grandpas ride these old bikes as their primary form of transportation, their “cars.” Young couples ride them tandem, the beau pedaling and his girl sitting primly sidesaddle on the rear rack, on sunny days topped by a lovely umbrella to shield her fair skin from the sun. They ride slowly, often well-dressed, and you can hear them conversing as they go. They often stare or doubletake at you as they glide by. “Weiguoren….hallo!” Toothy smiles. Play.

Grandmas squat on the sidewalk with their squatting grandchildren, steadying them so they can pee on the sidewalk without mishap. It’s normal – and really, foreigner, relax. How dirty can baby-pee be? Mothers carry their babies in jumpers designed to expose their bottoms, a daily parade of babies’ butts. Barber shops full of migrant peasant girls staring out the windows, almost never working, instead watching TV or chatting and eating together, or napping. They’ll take you upstairs and give you an hour’s massage for ten bucks. Sometimes “massage” is more broadly defined than it is in the West, without seeming seedy at all. The moral world is different here too,  much more accepting and far less ashamed of Nature. If massages are to relax all of the body, the thinking seems to go, then it only makes sense that the whole body be massaged.

And the wonder of the public parks in China: already at six a.m. they’re alive. Grandmas in military formation under a willow, led by a grandma with a ghetto-blaster playing traditional Chinese folk songs. They dance with swords, red fans, red scarves that fly in synchronous arcs as the old gals twirl. Grandpas carry their pet birds or crickets in bamboo cages, hang them on low tree branches, and sit under them with other grandpas on portable stools. Rainbow bridges arc over their upside-down reflections in the canals. The willows rustle, the birds sing. Peasants beat the sun to lay their daily harvest on the sidewalk, barter with the locals buying their daily vegetables. They weigh them on notched bamboo sticks suspended by a string, with counterweighing stones on one end. The big smiles, the missing teeth, the bowed backs from decades in the fields. The thatched hats.

The neighborhood park is also a free gym. More grandmas and grandpas, fathers and mothers, teens and children swarm the simple machines for their daily workout. They wear leather dress shoes with cheap gym suits or pajamas – pajamas, you’d been told, are a status symbol, since owning a pair means you have money to spare. They wear dress shirts and pants, they wear anything and everything as they do their sit-ups and back-stretches and presses. You see your neighbor – the one who had the chicken tethered to his front patio for several days until yesterday, when you happened by as he was wringing its neck in preparation for the night’s dinner – doing pull-ups. The sun is still not yet up.

After the sun goes down, these people fill the park for different activities. Young couples sit on its hillocks in the dark, next to the reflective pond and mechanical waterfall, away from their crowded apartments, to feast on their privacy together. Young and old alike fill the park’s circular center plaza, where yet another grandma with a boom-box fills the twilit sky with ballroom dance music. Old and young waltz, foxtrot, tango; they do it man with woman, man with man, woman with woman, young with old. They do it with four-year-olds. They see the weiguoren and pull him out to shake a leg, laughing at his baby-talk with those smiles, those missing teeth, those other perfections.

Looking at all of these people – the ancient ones most of all – it dawns on you that you, of all the foreigners teaching at your school and living in this neighborhood at the edge of Shanghai’s sprawl, may be the luckiest. Unlike you, they’ve been teaching algebra, or physics, or literature or phys. ed., while you, blessedly, have been teaching the history of China – the history of these very people dancing around you, dancing with you, at the park. Looking into the old folks’ bright and wizened eyes, at the lacework lining their faces, you’re struck by the fact that these very same people so happy around you now lived, decades ago, through the hardships of the Civil War, the Japanese Invasion, the Great Leap Forward, the Great Famine, the Cultural Revolution. How many of them have seen starvation, war, re-education, labor camps? How many loved ones have they lost – or been betrayed by? And yet here they are now, leading you in a dance whose steps finally, after a century-long nightmare, are light and joyous. Christ, the presence of old Chuang-tse laughing down the Tao,  and of the imperturbable old Buddha mindful that this too shall pass – both are palpable in them all.

All of this, in a word, makes living in China as a foreigner a constant encounter with a truly different world. These people, with their cramped, dingy apartments and their dates on their battered old bicycles, with their bad teeth and their conspicuous pajamas, with their $100 a month incomes – they are poor, looked at with one set of eyes. But looked at through different eyes, that see wealth in terms unrelated to income, they’re among the richest people I’ve ever known.

If I ever have the chance to live there again, I’ll probably take it. No country – America included, America especially – has ever suited me like China has. If that luck doesn’t come my way, I count myself among the blessed for the experience. I know that’s sentimental, but it’s no less true for that.

The dance.

A simple grace.

A natural thing.

Morning Tai Chi at the Bund.

A storied face.

Primary transportation.

More photos below the fold… Read the rest of this entry »

I’m almost finished with the latest Unsucky Lecture on Gilgamesh, Book V. Consider the below an attempt at an “unsucky interlude” that somehow needed saying:

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If I tried to stand in front of students in a classroom and say everything I want to say about Book V of Gilgamesh, I’m afraid I would scare them – I mean scare them for real, as in make them lose sleep.

That’s really not something I want to do. They’re 14, 15 years old. Life should be light at that age.

Then again, they’re in high school now, and if you think about a lot of what they’re supposed to be learning right now, it’s hard to argue that education shouldn’t be frightening sometimes. Think of their history classes: darkness, darkness. Gladiators fighting to the death for the entertainment of the elite Romans, criminals being nailed to die on crosses in the name of Roman justice; centuries later, “heretics” – independent thinkers – being burned alive in the name of God; centuries after that, scientists and philosophers “disenchanting” the universe, giving us less and less reason to believe any comforting old notions that Something Up There loves us, that anything comes after death; guillotines working overtime, later, in Paris – and human ovens, later still, in Auschwitz; poison gas in World War I drowning soldiers in their own blood-filled lungs, American mushroom clouds atomizing entire Japanese cities in a flash, on and on.

James Joyce wrote it and it’s true: “History is a nightmare” – and schools serve up those nightmares to students daily.

And yet, those nightmares don’t seem to frighten our students. They didn’t scare me either, when I was in high school. Honestly, I don’t even remember anything from my high school history classes. Something about youth, maybe, is immune to the terror we should experience when looking at our reflection in history’s mirror. Or maybe it’s school, the way it teaches the stuff. Maybe all the adults in charge of education – the teachers, the textbook-writers, the principals and parents and politicians and preachers – share this desire to protect students from terror. They want to sanitize the terror, tame it into factoids. Just like me.

But is it possible that this desire to protect students from fear, to keep them comfortable, is actually a deeper betrayal of their education? Is comfort more important than truth?

I often think students entering high school need to hear a few things about adults, since we’re on the subject of comfort and truth, that they may have never heard adults say. For one thing, students might seriously consider the probability that most adults do choose comfort over truth, and compromise over goodness, in a million small ways. They might consider, too, that many, maybe most, adults choose to remain comfortably ignorant and entertained instead of to keep at the hard work of understanding the world and behaving in helpful ways. They might, in short, consider that most adults in both their own small world, and the larger one, are seriously limited, flawed, imperfect beings. And that, worse yet, our students will very probably grow up to be just as flawed.

That’s true of me, more than I care to admit. I still try to learn, to be a good person. But I don’t try nearly hard enough. It’s too inconvenient, and compromise is easier. Preach as I may at my students to be good boys and girls and solve the world’s problems when they grow up, impress them as I may with whatever knowledge or cleverness or passion I can muster – I’m still, to a very large degree, a hypocrite. Preaching goodness is easy; doing it is too hard. I know about so many wrongs in the world that should keep me awake at night, force me to stand up against them whatever the cost. But instead, I sleep easy. Welcome to adulthood.

This is not to say that we adults are bad. We’re just all-too-human. We’re still part of history, after all, and history didn’t magically stop being a nightmare the year we were born. The mirror is still a dark one. And it’s important to remember that there’s still much beauty and light in that reflection, too. It’s not all dark. And it’s certainly better than not being here, not being a part of it.

I guess I say all of this because something about Book V disturbs me in a very real way. There’s a moment in it that leaves no room for laughs, though I’m sure most readers didn’t notice this when they read it.

I didn’t notice it either, the first few times I read Gilgamesh. In fact, Book V struck me as probably the dumbest, most boring chapter of the whole epic (and we shouldn’t be surprised that this chapter is the one most often included in English textbooks). But English teachers have a luxury most other adults don’t have: they get to read the same book over and over and over, year after year. Because of that, they know something many other adults don’t know: great books only get better with each new reading.

A case in point: I’ve written two lectures on Book V already, lectures I worked really hard on, but they didn’t do it for me, so I didn’t publish them. In the more than two months since the last lecture, I’ve been stuck the whole time on Book V, unable to get into it and unable to get beyond it. I’ve been obsessing on it, thinking about it involuntarily at the dinner table, on the couch, in bed, on drives, on walks. It wouldn’t let me go, and I couldn’t let it go – and I wanted to, believe me, because it’s the end of Gilgamesh I hunger to get to in these lectures. But I’ve been stuck wrestling with the middle for two months. It hasn’t been happy. But something became clear this week, and if I can get it out here, dark as it is, I will be happy. Enjoy the irony, and give me a bit more time to finish the next lecture. I’m pulling back from my writing job at Change.org in order to get back to this work.

[The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous Questions ~ 2: The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job ~ 3: Adam and Eve, Backwards ~ 4. The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards ~ 5. Good, Evil, Nature, and the Hero, Backwards ~ 6. Gilgamesh and the Dawn of Man ~ 7. A Goddess Prays]¹

Gilgamesh - the Earth's Oldest Epic. Stephen Mitchell's fine 2004 adaptation.

I have a love-snore relationship with Book IV of Gilgamesh. On first read, in fact, it was snore-only, and no love. That changed on the second read, so stay with me.

First, the Snores

On the surface, it’s a tedious chapter that recounts the journey of Gilgamesh and Enkidu from the gates of Uruk to the edge of the Cedar Forest, home of the “evil” monster/”sacred” forest guardian Humbaba, whom Gilgamesh has decided to kill for glory. They travel a thousand miles every three days, only stopping for a lunch break at the 400th mile, and on the eve of the third day they pitch camp – where else – on the heights of a mountain-top where, closest to the gods in heaven, Gilgamesh apparently has better reception for dreams from the divinities. Enkidu encloses Gilgamesh in a magical circle of flour, a gust of wind portends a divinatory dream will indeed visit him. He goes to sleep, has by all appearances a very bad dream, wakes up terrified, and tells it to Enkidu. Enkidu then interprets the dream favorably, against all common sense, and Gilgamesh swallows it.

This happens five very repetitive times. The only thing that changes in each repetition is the content of the dream, and the outrageousness of Enkidu’s wishful interpreting.

In the first dream, Gilgamesh dreams a mountain falls on him and Enkidu. Enkidu tells him the mountain is Humbaba, who will fall like that mountain. (Never mind that the dream suggests they’ll both be crushed under him.)

In the second dream, the mountain falls only on Gilgamesh and pins him down, and a “shining man” frees him. Enkidu says the mountain is again Humbaba, and the shining man the sun-god Shamash (remember, Gilgamesh’s goddess-mother Ninsun prayed to Shamash to aid her son against Humbaba).

In the third dream, the heavens roar, the earth heaves, all goes dark and silent. Lightning incinerates the trees and all is ash. Enkidu really reaches on this one, saying the heavens are Humbaba, who is powerless to harm Gilgamesh.

In the fourth dream, an eagle with a lion’s head and flames shooting from its mouth attacks Gilgamesh, and a “young man” kills the eagle. Enkidu, *snore*, says the eagle is Humbaba, and the man is Shamash.

In the fifth dream, things get a bit “wtf”: a giant bull, whose bellow shatters the earth and clouds the sky with dust, pins Gilgamesh to the ground, but a man pulls him up, puts his arm around him, and gives him water. More “wtf” still, Enkidu out-does himself by interpreting the bull – get this – as Shamash, and the man as Lugalbanda, Gilgamesh’s father.

It’s not quite as bad as the “begats” in the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Numbers (and if God wrote the Bible, this snorer proves He needed a merciless editor), or the Catalogue of Ships in Book II of The Iliad, but it’s close.

Next, the Love

I’m an English teacher. One of the more obnoxious parts of my job is getting all preachy to students who whine that this or that book is “boring,” and telling them that a bored person suffers from a boring mind. There’s always a way, I preach, to turn lead into gold. You just have to stop snoring and wake up, and do that little “reader-response” trick of bringing your own experience and mental connections to the text.

And when I do that with this chapter, it gets a little fun. Let me count the ways.

On Dreams, Magic, Gods – and Poets

That whole “dreams comes from heaven” bit, for example. On the face of it, this motif in Gilgamesh is one of thousands of examples in ancient literature of early humanity’s mental childishness. Faced with questions for which they had no certain answers – Where do we come from? What happens to us after we die? What are these visions we experience in our sleep, and what causes them? On and on – our earliest ancestors settled on answers that today’s toddlers might swallow, but not today’s adults.

The whole thing brings to mind an analogy that, while I know it’s facile, I’m still fond of, and find compelling on many levels: the metaphor of (Western? Intellectual?) human history as the development of an individual human. Antiquity represents our early childhood, gullible enough to swallow Santa Claus; the Middle Ages is our later childhood, accepting whatever we’re told by our authoritarian father-figures in the Church; the Renaissance is our adolescence, rebelling against those fathers and creating new identities, seeking new truths; the Enlightenment is the prime of our adulthood, the cooling of that rebellious passion as we turn more earnestly to our work; we could throw Romanticism in there as a mid-life crisis, though I won’t push it; and our own Modernity – say, 1850 to today – that’s us past our prime, muddled and venal, physically and mentally flabby, caring more about comfort than work, sliding into mediocrity and, soon, senility. (The divine Oscar Wilde points to the same thing in reverse order with his maxim, “The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.”)

So our “young” Gilgamesh and Enkidu “know” that dreams come from the divine, are portents, omens, Things To Be Taken Seriously. Before you join me in a condescending smile, stop with me and ask yourself how many people you’ve known who are still so childish in their beliefs. Can you think of anybody like the man I met years ago who heard God speak to him from his television set – not once, but many times – and never once thought to ask himself, “Should I seek psychiatric help?” Or the good but hyper-religious friend who called me during my waiter shift at my Los Angeles restaurant to breathlessly tell me he had encountered God – and who over the next several months dressed – in Los Angeles – like Rasputin, cassock and Eastern cross necklace and all, and gathered a troupe of disciples around himself renamed after Jesus’ original twelve? Or any number of the no-less-extreme, though more socially accepted (and very well-fed) men on our radios, televisions, and megachurches who claim to talk to God on a regular basis? People who talk about auras, horoscopes, astrological charts, End Times, Nostradamus, on and on?

Ask yourself, better still, if you’re still childish in any similar way. I was once. In fact, I was just like Gilgamesh in this chapter: In my truth-seeking twenties, way back in the late 1980s, I went to an Oregon mountain-top, had a friend sit me inside a magic circle, and prepared to fast there for three days in hopes of receiving a vision from the gods – specifically, the Native American gods of the Pacific Northwestern Sundance religion. The punchline: we had to cancel the “vision-quest” because a) one of us had forgotten to bring a meat-offering for the bird-spirits, and you couldn’t have a vision-quest without a bird offering any more than Gilgamesh apparently could without that magic flour; and b) my helper-friend had a romantic crisis with his girl-friend, and had to run back to his distant town in order to patch things up.

(Gilgamesh was lucky Enkidu didn’t have a high-maintenance girlfriend.)

Don’t think for a minute that I regret those years. And don’t think, either, that I don’t enjoy being able to laugh at them from a completely different mental space 20 years later. Above all, to tie this tangent back to the “intellectual history as individual development” analogy, do think that the reason I was able to outgrow that childish stage was that I went on to study history from antiquity to the present in college, and to grow in that process to intellectual maturity – which, believe me, means much intellectual humility and skepticism, lest you think I’m prideful by saying this. (Nutshell: At the end of a semester of immersion in Greek and Roman studies, I wanted to be a Classicist; at the end of the next semester of Medieval Studies immersion, I wanted to be a monk – and actually called a monastery asking how I could; the following semester’s immersion in Renaissance and Modern Studies thankfully pulled me past that stage, and left me more of a Marxist than anything. Readings since then have pulled me beyond that stage too.)

So the childish magical thinking we chuckle at in Gilgamesh survives all around us, 5,000 years later, all over the world. I’ve traveled much of that world as an adult, and seen it. I saw it in my native United States, where spells said over water, bread, juice, and the like, are believed to magically transform them. I’ve seen it in Europe in the same manifestations. I’ve seen it in Kosovo, as a NATO peace-keeper trying to protect the people who drop to their knees five times a day on the streets to point in a magical direction and pray from being killed by their fellow country-men who believe in a different magic. I saw it in a Buddhist monastery in the Yunnan province of China near the Tibetan plateau, when an ancient monk put a magic string around my wrist. I saw it in Bali, Indonesia, at a Hindu temple full of incense and drumming with monkeys scrambling in trees overhead. I’ve seen it most recently at my Korean mother-in-law’s fresh grave-site, where her family visits and speaks no words of their own to her, but instead opens their magic book above her and reads from it, sings its songs, and then leaves. (I always talk to her at that point, fully doubting she hears at all, just because it seems so heartless to leave without saying a simple “We loved you.”) And I’ve wished for each of those countries that its people could have the opportunity to study history, or travel the world and observe it like I’ve been lucky enough to do, or both, so they could start questioning all the tribal, divisive magics separately claiming to speak their many One Truths on our inseparable, indivisible One Planet spinning through this One never-fully-explainable mystery called the cosmos.

Back to Gilgamesh, Who We Never Really Left – and His Poets

Reader-response. Connecting our experiences to what we read, riffing off the connections. All the above does connect, in this reader’s mind, anyway, to one thing about this snorer of a chapter in Gilgamesh that I love. It’s this: I can’t help but suspect the poets behind this work of being far less childish than their place at the infancy of civilization suggests they should be. Even more, I see signs in this chapter of a sensibility that is startlingly modern: I see these poets as laughing at the childishness of the religious beliefs of their culture.

The clues are in Enkidu’s interpretations of Gilgamesh’s five “dreams from the gods.” It’s not just that Enkidu gives different interpretations of the dreams – for example, Gilgamesh’s “helper” being Shamash in Dream Two and Four, but Lugalbanda in Dream Five. These are noticeably strange, and I always tell my students that if something is strange – is a “wtf?” – in literature,  the author(s) want us to notice them. The poets may indeed want us to notice how contradictory the interpretations are, and laugh at them a bit.

But the more laughable thing, the most interesting “wtf?”, lies in the increasing outlandishness of each interpretation. Dream One doesn’t raise a brow: the falling mountain represents the falling Humbaba – reasonable enough, so we’ll take it seriously. Dream Two doesn’t phase us either: the falling mountain is again Humbaba, and the god Gilgamesh’s mother prayed to for help, Shamash, is the helper in the dream. Enkidu’s interpretation of Dream Three gets more interesting, though, and upsets our expectations: Gilgamesh seems to die unaided in this one – it ends, remember, in “darkness, silence, and ash” – and Enkidu’s interpretation that the dream shows Humbaba is “powerless to harm” Gilgamesh doesn’t satisfactorily explain away that deathlike ending. Anybody awake in the audience, then or now, would presumably notice this slight “wtf,” and wake up a bit. It’s not reasonable enough to satisfy.

The interpretation of Dream Four, though, returns to reason, and lulls the alert reader’s misgivings: the eagle-monster is Humbaba, and its killer who comes to the King’s aid, Shamash – still delivering the help Ninsun begged him to give her son. This makes Dream Three’s interpretation seem a minor fluke. All is again as it should be in the land of story-telling logic. We should take this dream-interpretation stuff seriously. All that flour and favorable mountain-top wind works some serious magic to call down the attention of the divine.

Then comes Dream Five, which I swear strikes me as one of the grandest practical jokes ever played on priest by poet. No listener with the slightest hint of intelligence can take its interpretation seriously: Enkidu tells Gilgamesh the giant bull who almost kills him in this dream – who is his enemy – is not Humbaba this time, as we’d expect, but, wtf?!, Shamash, who in the previous dreams has been Gilgamesh’s divine helper. More wtf still, the helper in this dream is Gilgamesh’s father who comes out of nowhere and, though a former king himself, is still hard to see as a match for the sun-god from whom he saves Gilgamesh.

Remember, this poem was worked and re-worked over at least 1,500 years. That’s ample time for the court poets to find an interpretation for this dream less jarring on the audience’s imagination and less insulting to its intelligence. Yet there it stands, thumbing its outlandish nose at us all, with all its authorial authority. Why did the poets keep this detail as it is?

In my most mischievous imagination, they did it to confront their ancient audience with a choice: You either believe the authorities – us – and our sacred tale, no matter how absurd – or you learn the lesson we’re trying to point to here: sometimes you have to face facts, show some skeptical courage, and call nonsense by its name. This dream interpretation stuff is for the birds.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t help but wonder how many priests’ feathers were ruffled by this scene over the thousands of years of its telling.

A closing question: the interpretation of dreams – oneiromancy, for any students out there wanting extra points on their Gilgamesh essays – was a widespread religious superstition in the ancient world. The Hebrews did it, the Greeks did it, even educated fleas did it – but did any of those other “childhood cultures” do it with the implicit skepticism and ambiguity I argue we see here?

If not, those Sumero-Babylonians were awfully mature for their Age.

1. This series based on the fine 2004 Stephen Mitchell adaptation of Gilgamesh. [↩]

[The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous Questions ~ 2: The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job ~ 3: Adam and Eve, Backwards ~ 4. The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards ~ 5. Good, Evil, Nature, and the Hero, Backwards ~ 6. Gilgamesh and the Dawn of Man ~ 7. This Post ~ 8. The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets]¹

Gilgamesh - the Earth's Oldest Epic. Stephen Mitchell's fine 2004 adaptation.

We last left Gilgamesh laughing at the elders for urging him to fear the gods and doubt his own ability to do what none have done before. We noted it was perhaps the first Humanist’s laugh in world literature, 2,500 years before Socrates laughed similarly at the pious believers in Zeus.

Gilgamesh and Enkidu are almost, almost ready to embark on their quest to kill Humbaba, the guardian of the sacred Cedar Forest who is sacred to the god Enlil, but evil to several other gods and goddesses, in the wonderfully grey and grown-up moral sphere of the Sumero-Babylonians, so different from the black-and-white moral simplicity of other, more familiar, religions.

But before we follow them out the gate, we have one more stop to make with our two heroes: the Temple of Ninsun, the goddess who is Gilgamesh’s mother. It only makes sense to visit your mother before you leave to court death (I did the same with my best friend when we left my hometown in the ’80s to hitchhike across America all summer, come what monsters may). It makes more sense when she’s a goddess who might pull some divine strings to help you survive your adventure.

It’s an episode with a few details worth pausing over.

Worship on the Heights

We see in this scene, for example, another instance of Sumero-Babylonian religious ritual that causes me envy: their “worship on the heights.” We saw it before in the Temple of Ishtar, the pyramid-like ziggurat atop which, under sun or moon and stars I don’t know, the king seems to have made ritual love to Ishtar’s high priestess. We see it in this scene when Ninsun, after first bathing in “water of tamarisk and soapwort,” arrays herself in “her finest robe, a wide belt, / a jeweled necklace,” and “her crown,” then ascends to the roof of her temple to light incense to accompany her skyward prayer to the sun-god Shamash.

(Can I pause to share that I learned to speak, read and write the Arabic language when I was in the rightly oxymoronic U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence branch back in the ’90s, and that a word I learned there made this prayer-scene a bit mind-bending? The word was not quite “Shamash,” but it was close. It was “shahms” (شمس) – the Arabic word for, you guessed it: sun. The word stretches back to the beginning of human history, and beyond into prehistory. The young god of today’s monotheistic Arabs, Allah, may have taken the throne of heaven from Shamash in Arab religion a mere 1,400 years ago ; but in their language, he still shares heaven with that 6,000-year-oldest god. Shamash still shines on them today.)

We’ll see more of this preference for open-air, panoramic, sky-as-cathedral worship later. I just love it. Synagogues, churches, and mosques should cast a fresh look at their rooftops, and ask if there’s any potential to get closer to the Unnameable up there, instead of down below. [Self-critical update: It occurred to me later that the rooftop heights seem reserved for the elites only - kings and goddesses, so far, in this case. They ascend alone, and return below to the other devotees, from what I can see. I still like the idea, however unsupported it is on second look.]

A Prayer in Babylon’s Defense

Anyway, on her temple rooftop, under the azure dome of Shamash’s sky, Ninsun has her moment on the world-literary stage. She doesn’t blow it.

She asks Shamash the question every mother of a hot-blooded son asks: “You have granted my son / beauty and strength and courage / – why have you burdened him with a restless heart?” Whether intentional or not, I find it interesting that Ninsun’s list of her son’s gifts lacks the gift of wisdom.² Wisdom is what Gilgamesh will gain by the end of the tale – or perhaps only we will, by knowing his story.

Ninsun then goes on to utter what I like to call her “Ode to the Sun” which, in Mitchell’s adaptation³, deserves a place in our anthologies of the world’s religious poetry:

O Lord Shamash, glorious sun,
delight of the gods, illuminator
of the world, who rise and the light is born,
it fills the heavens, the whole earth takes shape,
the mountains form, the valleys grow bright,
darkness vanishes, evil retreats,
all creatures wake up and open their eyes,
they see you, they are filled with joy….

If any eight lines of verse can serve to refute all the Bible’s Babylon-bashing – an example of what mythologist Joseph Campbell calls one culture’s “mythic assassination” of its enemy’s culture – these eight have my vote. They’re not deep or fancy, and that’s their merit: the simple reverence of the lines, especially the image of all creatures waking to be filled with joy at the sight of a new day – they bespeak a gentle gratitude and majesty that gives the lie to the “whorish” slurs cast by the Hebrew and Christian texts. It’s wonderful that the Babylonian text can finally speak for itself again. (I don’t think I’ve mentioned that the cuneiform-imprinted clay tablets containing the epic lay mute and buried under the Iraqi sands for over 2,000 years, until they were uncovered by a British traveler around 1850, and then translated about 25 years later. So from the time of roughly Socrates, through the Roman Empire, Middle Ages, Renaissance, and half the modern period, this story was lost to the world, buried in silence. We’re unbelievably lucky to be alive to hear its ancient voice today. It’s a form of time-travel most of our forebears could not enjoy.)

The Visit Ends, the Adventure Begins

Ninsun goes on to do what so many mothers do who fear for their child’s success: she asks the god to cheat for him. When Gilgamesh and Enkidu close in battle with Humbaba, she asks Shamash to pin him with every wind known to nature – East Wind, West Wind, North and South, with tornadoes and gale and hurricane wind thrown in for good measure – to “make it easy” for her son to kill him.

She then descends and returns to Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and adds one more civilized gift to the recently-civilized Enkidu: a family. Ninsun tells Enkidu that she is adopting him as her son, places an amulet around his neck, and tells him to be a good brother to Gilgamesh. And Enkidu, gentle as ever (but not for much longer, as we’ll see), weeps. He has a mother now, and a brother.

An interesting detail in this adoption scene shows us more about the heirodules, or “temple prostitutes” in Ishtar’s cultic service, that we met in the first lecture. Ninsun says she adopts Enkidu “as a priestess takes in an abandoned child.” So we learn that the cult of Ishtar served a charitable function in Sumero-Babylonian society by serving as orphanages. I wonder what more the scholars can tell us about that.

Gilgamesh and Enkidu then take their weaponry and march past the cheering young men and the well-wishing elders to the gate, and beyond. That weaponry, by the way? Each had an axe that weighed “two hundred pounds,” knives with gold mountings, quivers and bows and armor “weighing more than six hundred pounds.”

You have to wonder if there were ever any Sumerian or Babylonian fundamentalists who took these details literally – and if there were any Sumero-Babylonian literature teachers who countered them with the question we ask of our own variety of literalist today: “Can you say hyperbole?”

1. This series based on the fine 2004 Stephen Mitchell adaptation of Gilgamesh. [↩]
2. Since the Gilgamesh court poets polished this epic over 15 centuries, I lean toward “intentional.” [↩]
3. which in this case hews close to the original [↩]